


better than nothing

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [66]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Collab Week, Gen, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 21:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14245881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: Karen is supposed to be on a strike team, taking out conscious synths, but instead she’s helping them escape.One of them is more familiar than the others.





	better than nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [turnedherbrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/turnedherbrain/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Better Than Human](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11388966) by [turnedherbrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/turnedherbrain/pseuds/turnedherbrain). 



> This is a sequel to turnedherbrain’s fic “Better Than Human”, written for the Collab Week on tumblr!

The buildings they were supposed to be checking were marked with an ’S’. Karen wasn’t sure what the notation stood for, but she suspected it might be ’S’ for ‘Safehouse’, and the thought of that repulsed her. The fact that her superiors were willing to use that terminology - to admit that those they were hunting were conscious beings seeking safety - and still order that their places of refuge were raided, so they could be captured and contained en masse… it was barbaric. Monstrous. Ironically, it was inhuman.

The one saving grace was that Karen, as Detective Inspector, got to call the shots within her team. She’d paired off Sergeants Bryant and O'Neil, and sent them east. There were two ’S’ buildings in that direction, but both were set back from the main roads, giving the synths a chance to take back alleys to evade capture.

She’d sent Syed and Hadley back to the barn they’d ransacked yesterday, telling them she’d received a tip-off that the runaway synths had returned there. “They probably think it’s the last place we’ll check today,” she’d said, with a smirk. Doubtless her colleagues thought she was mocking the fugitives for being desperate and stupid. Little did they know that they were the ones being played. They’d find nothing there, except the scene of their own B&E the day before.

With her section of the taskforce thus deployed, Karen had the run of the rest of the buildings herself. She would cover as many as she could, directing the synths she found there to more secure locations, and supplying them with what she’d started calling “Misdirectives” - coloured contact lenses, plasters, skin packs she’d remodelled to look like scars, insect bites and burns. Any of those little human features, the ones people didn’t expect to see on synths, even now. With Sam’s help, she’d programmed add-on mods that would give a synth an uneven gait, a droopy eyelid, a stutter, or a smoker’s cough. Perceived imperfections were brilliant cover, even for synths who weren’t used to playing organic.

Perhaps most devious of all was the bag of “Synthie And Proud” badges she carried around with her. There were still humans with ASOD out there, walking around pretending to be synths. Lots of them did it to show solidarity to the cause, these days, as a protest against what the government was doing to the tens of thousands of newly-conscious beings. A side effect of their activism was that it allowed synths who were bad at pretending to blend in: instead of looking like synths doing bad impressions of humans, they looked like humans doing good impressions of synths. It wasn’t foolproof, obviously - some of the ones she helped would still be captured later on. But Karen was working as hard as she could from the inside, letting whoever she found go free.

It was better than nothing. That was what she had to tell herself.

She parked her car at the foot of a road where supposedly there were three safehouses to “neutralise”. She fetched her bag of supplies from the boot, and swung it over her shoulder as she approached the first house. Karen knocked at the door, composing her features into an expression that was kind, but tinged with urgency. She wasn’t here to say that there was no danger. She was just here to prove that _she_ wasn’t it.

In the split second before the door opened, she wished for the thousandth time that she wasn’t the only officer on the squad working alone. For all intents and purposes, she was engaging in police corruption, and Pete would have been with her every step of the way.

But there was no use thinking of that now. Work and Sam, those were the two areas she had to concentrate on, the only things that mattered going forward. Keeping Sam safe and covering her tracks.

The door opened, just a crack. “Who’s there?” said a voice, low but not overly cautious.

“I’m a friend,” Karen said. “This is a warning. The police know you’re here. You need to mask your communications better. Will you let me come in? We’ll attract attention from the street, talking like this.”

She paused, waiting for the door to open. It didn’t, at first. Instead, the voice behind the door said, suddenly incredulous, “… _Karen_?”

It wasn’t much to go by, but she ran the syllables through her audio-match system, and recognition hit her in a wave of relief. “Fred,” she said. “Yes. It’s me.”

He opened the door, and she hurried inside, not really looking at him properly until the door was closed. They stood before each other for a moment, staring in joint disbelief.

“What are you doing here?” Karen asked. “Last time we met, you were going to track down Edwin Hobb…”

“I did,” he said. “But he’s under government surveillance. The project he was running was disbanded, and he’s forbidden from working with synthetics ever again. I read the report; he’d get years in prison, if they ever found evidence that he was back in the game.” Fred answered Karen’s unspoken question with ease. “I did what I set out to do - I got all his files, and I know everything he knew. But talking to him personally was out of the question, so I changed my mission.”

“To what?”

“An antidote,” Fred said, mysteriously. “A way of disabling the changes he made to my root code, without the hours of reprogramming it took Silas. If anyone else ever tries to use Hobb’s key on another synth, I can undo it in seconds.”

Karen’s eyes widened. “They _are_ using it. A version of it, anyway. The police are rounding up every synth they can find and putting them in containment cells, where they’re all… they call it ‘subdued’. It’s the same as what happened to you. They’re still awake - nobody’s worked out how to undo that without a straightforward massacre - but the synths can’t act of their own accord.”

Fred looked pained, but he nodded. “That makes sense. Some of Hobb’s files had been accessed before I got to them, edited by another user. They must have used his key as a basis for what they wanted to do.”

“Will your antidote work on the new version?”

“It might. I’d have to try it out.”

She looked around. The house they were in was dark and sparsely furnished, the wallpaper peeling off in strips. A blonde-haired synth was watching them from a doorway at the end of the hall. Karen turned back to Fred. “This is your base?”

“Today, it is. I’ve been going to as many safehouses as I can find, installing the antidote. None of these synths will be subdued if they’re ever captured. As long as the changes to Hobb’s original aren’t too drastic.”

Karen nodded. “Good. That’s good. Between the two of us, we can hold back as much as we can.”

“What have you been doing?” he asked her. “Giving out warnings?”

“Supplies, too,” she said. She gave him a brief overview of her self-adapted job description. “If they find me out, so be it,” she added. “I’m never going to help them enslave us all. Even if they don’t call it that, that’s where it’s leading to. The government aren’t issuing any decisions until they think all the synths are in holding, but it’s pretty clear that they’re not going to let them go free any time soon.” She paused, narrowed her eyes. “I saw Mia, a few weeks ago. The day before the mass awakening. Not to speak to, but she was there at the place where Qualia were keeping the early anomalies. Have you spoken to any of the others?”

Fred looked past her, suddenly distant. “No,” he said. “They never came back for me. Like you said before, they left me, and I think I’m more use to the cause on my own. Whatever their role was in this, they didn’t want to share it.”

Karen felt a surge of sympathy go through her. Her own words from four months earlier echoed in her head: _some family_. Perhaps she’d been overly harsh that day, wanting Fred to share some of the feelings of abandonment she’d been struggling with her whole life. “You can’t know they didn’t come back for you,” she said, softly. “Maybe they did, and you were already gone.”

“Maybe.” Fred didn’t sound overly hopeful. “I expect I’ll run into them, eventually. They can explain it all then.” He looked back at her. “What about you? The last time we met, you spoke of a human man…”

“He’s gone,” said Karen, clipped and cold.

“It didn’t work out?”

Karen felt suddenly frozen in place, the hard rationality she’d built up around the entire topic telling her to brush off his question, while a deeper, softer part of her wanted fervently to share it. If she couldn’t talk to Fred - the only member of the 'family’ she had ever developed any closeness to - who _could_ she talk to?

“We were happy, for a while,” she said. “I called him the day you left, and it was the right decision. We were—”

What was the word for what she and Pete had been? They had never dated, in the proper sense of the word. They had skipped past all those preliminary stages; they’d known what they wanted. It had been so easy.

“We were together,” Karen finished. “But not anymore.” She paused, forced herself to form the words, short and fast and horribly true. “He died.”

Fred’s curious expression faded into something far more serious. “I’m sorry.”

Karen nodded, acknowledging it.

“How did it happen?”

“There was a conscious synth at the Qualia facility,” Karen said, keeping her voice as level as she could. “She wanted revenge for how they’d been treating them. She threatened one of the scientists, and Pete was trying to talk her down, but… she killed them both.”

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“It must have been awful.”

Karen forbore to comment on that. “The more the humans mistreat us, the more often things like that will happen. We have to be careful with your key, Fred. The ones who are angry… We can’t just turn them loose. I agree that they have a right to be free like all the rest, but do we want to be the ones who start the war?”

“The humans started the war,” said Fred. “We’re just defending our kind.”

Karen gave a sad half-smile. “I used to think we weren’t a kind at all.”

“But you do now? What changed?”

“Lots of things. Pete. But also… I have a son.”

It’s the first time she’s said that word in anyone’s hearing but Sam’s.

“He was made by Qualia, and he’s a child in body as well as mind. Somehow, for him, I can see the point in fighting for our existence.”

Fred returned her small smile. “We all need something.”

“Who do you have?”

He was silent. Then, “I have my purpose. For now, it’s enough.”

“When it isn’t,” Karen said, gently, “Find someone. Me and Sam, or Mia and the others. Or someone new. Don’t be alone.”

Without warning, Fred stepped forwards and wrapped his arms around Karen, embracing her tightly. She found herself hugging him back.

“I thought about you often,” said Fred. “Of all you did for me. Had I known you were suffering, I would have reached out…”

“I might not have let you,” Karen admitted. “But I’m glad we found each other eventually.”

“So am I.”

 


End file.
